The narrow focus on speeding has blinded everyone to the real causes of death on our roads, writes JOSHUA DOWLING.

Inaction and its fatal consequences

Media and safety commentators are in a spin. They want to stop the carnage on our roads following the deaths of four teenagers at the weekend on the North Coast. But sadly, this crash is likely to prompt the same reaction as the hundreds before it: nothing.

As tragic as the teenagers' deaths are, they're merely another reminder of the substandard condition of our roads, and the state and federal governments' approach to road safety. Talkback radio has been flooded with suggestions - good and bad - as the community tries to find simple answers to a complex problem.

While everyone seems to be in a lather about young drivers, we need to realise that while they are over-represented in fatal crashes, they are not the only ones dying on our roads.

Where was the outrage after the death of a truck driver on Friday night on the Pacific Highway just south of Grafton? Did you even hear about it? Or after a truck driver died last week on the Hume Highway between Holbrook and Tarcutta? Should a truck driver's life be valued any less than a teenager's?

Both truck crashes happened on undivided, single-lane sections of the main routes between our three biggest cities. In truckie-speak, these sections are known as goat tracks. While the four teenagers did not die on the Pacific Highway, two-thirds of it is typical of the section of road they were travelling on - and highlights the need for urgent upgrades.

I had the misfortune of travelling on the Pacific Highway between Tweed Heads and Sydney at the weekend and came across the truck wreckage at Grafton. I was dumbfounded by the condition of the road, how steep it was and how tightly it wound in some sections, and began to note the stretches of divided, dual-lane freeway. They are few and far between.

I travel between Sydney and Melbourne on the Hume Highway about 12 times a year but hadn't travelled to the North Coast for a while. I came to the conclusion that the NSW Government has the best advertisement for tourism to Victoria: the Pacific Highway.

But for the 60 kilometres of Hume Highway between Holbrook and Tarcutta and the zig-zag through the streets of Albury (soon to be bypassed by a new section of freeway), the Sydney-Melbourne road is divided dual lanes all the way.

My trip computer showed that less than a third (245 kilometres of 750) of the road between Newcastle and Tweed Heads is divided dual-lane carriageway. How many deaths have come from dangerous overtaking manoeuvres caused by a lack of passing lanes?

Mayors from the towns that dot the Pacific Highway have been calling for upgrades for years. The calls have fallen mostly on deaf ears. There are some new sections of freeway under construction but the Government has been more successful at installing speed cameras than it has in fixing the road.

A preoccupation with speeding appears to have done little, if anything, to reduce the road toll. The Government - and possibly the media - ought to share the blame for narrowing the focus on speed. A report by the Federal Government in November 2003 showed that the biggest factor for reducing the death toll was fixing the roads.

The Federal Government's 2003 National Road Safety Strategy said better roads could reduce fatalities by 332 a year (about 1700 motorists die across Australia, more than 500 in NSW). Safer vehicles could prevent 175 deaths, and driver behaviour, 158.

The Australian Automobile Association's executive director, Lauchlan McIntosh, yesterday returned from a road safety conference in Barcelona. "Global research shows the biggest gains come from better roads, then safer cars, then better driver behaviour," he said. "But you've got to work on all areas. It's no good having a safe infrastructure if you have unsafe cars, and it's no good having safe cars if you have unsafe roads.

"Ordinary people make ordinary mistakes and unfortunately they die. We no longer let people in the workplace work with dangerous machinery, so we need to fix the roads. We need a cultural shift from the public and the government towards the role that better roads play."

Part of the problem is defining who is responsible for road funding. At present, it's shared between federal, state and local governments. And the responsibility of individual ministers varies. How many roads ministers have we had in NSW in the past five years? Road safety is a hot potato.

Politicians are loath to make expensive and potentially unpopular decisions (such as introducing better driver education measures or spending more on roads and policing) when they're unlikely to see the benefit in their term in office. No doubt geography is part of the reason we don't have a freeway all the way to the North Coast. It's more expensive to build roads when you've got to excavate mountains to straighten out the bends.

And there's the rub. It is easier, cheaper - and more profitable - to introduce and enforce laws. But do they work? Over the past five years, the NSW Government has introduced some of the harshest penalties in Australia.

You can lose a quarter of your licence for doing 68kmh in a 60kmh zone - the same penalty for doing 78kmh. More than 100 fixed speed cameras dot the state. The Roads and Traffic Authority has created a list of powerful cars that novices are banned from driving. Despite these measures the road toll has gone up. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau says the NSW toll between January and August was up 4.1 per cent compared with the same period the previous year. The national road toll for the same period was down 2.4 per cent.

The recently touted restriction on the number of passengers or night curfews on novice drivers may have merit, but without enough police to enforce the laws, who's going to stop young drivers from breaking them? Fixed speed cameras don't detect cars crossing to the wrong side of the road, misjudging the speed of a car when pulling out of an intersection (or from the many sleepy hollows along the Pacific Highway), or a driver sending a text message.

It's little wonder I drove to the Queensland border and back and didn't see a highway patrol car. The number of highway patrol officers is chronically low. In the 1980s, about 1300 highway patrol officers policed 3 million drivers across NSW. Today about 900 of them police 4 million drivers. To get highway patrol numbers back to their effectiveness of 20 years ago, we'd need to almost double the number of traffic police to 1700.

Professor Mark Stevenson from the George Institute for International Health has been studying driver behaviour for 20 years. He is a supporter of passenger restrictions and night curfews. He says the way around the problem of a lack of police enforcement is by making parents responsible. But that's not ideal either.

It's common knowledge that some parents "fudge" their teenager's learner driver logbook to clock up the minimum of 50 hours' driving. I know of one instructor who was presented with a log book that had two lines filled out: Sydney to Darwin, 25 hours. Darwin to Sydney, 25 hours.

Who says parents are the best instructors anyway? How do we know they aren't passing on bad habits? I see plenty of poor driving from motorists of all ages in my travels.

Advanced driver training is costly and not practical to enforce in the thousands. It can also lead to over-confidence. Intensive driver awareness courses conducted at schools have more merit.

Why not make driver tests compulsory, say, every five years? Traffic rules and fines change subtly every year and yet, unless you search for the information, there is no device for motorists to be brought up to date.

It would also be a great opportunity to educate - and re-educate - motorists about new rules or emerging dangers, gleaned from information from serious-injury and fatal crashes.

Until our state and federal governments get serious about road funding, driver education and police numbers, we will continue to be shocked by horror stories on our roads.